Black History Month SpecialLies for Profit: The Myth of Black History

Every High School student has had the story drummed into him: Dr. Charles Drew, the brilliant Negro medical researcher who discovered how to preserve human blood plasma so that it could be used for transfusions, is responsible for saving countless lives of wounded GIs during the Second World War. Five years after the war, however, White racism was responsible for Drew’s own death.

The poignant story was first told by William Loren Katz in his high school textbook, Eyewitness: the Negro in American History (1967). On page 449 of the book Katz writes: “On April 1, 1950, Dr. Drew was injured in an auto accident near Burlington, North Carolina. Although he was bleeding profusely, he was turned away from the nearest ‘white’ hospital. By the time he was taken to another hospital, the scientist had bled to death.”

Every major element in this story is untrue. First, Drew was hardly a “Negro.” He was of mixed race, at least three-quarters White, as his photograph clearly reveals.

Second, his actual contribution to the technology of the modern blood bank was minimal. His work for the Red Cross Blood Bank was more logistic and administrative than scientific, and it involved nothing in the way of a scientific breakthrough or a major technical innovation.

Third, the claim that Drew bled to death after being turned away from a White hospital has been flatly contradicted by virtually everyone, including Blacks, with firsthand knowledge of his death. When Drew fell asleep at the wheel of his car on April 1, 1950, it ran off the road, threw him out, and rolled over him. He suffered massive brain damage and chest injuries. One leg was nearly severed.

He was rushed to Alamance General Hospital, where three White physicians worked desperately for two hours to save his life. One of the witnesses to the emergency-room drama in the hospital on that morning was Dr. Charles Mason Quick, now a 67-year-old Black physician practicing in Fayetteville. In an interview in Greensboro last month, Quick told newsmen what he had seen. He says he wants to establish a North Carolina scholarship in memory of Drew “that would go a long way toward dispelling this terrible myth.”

Another witness was Marvin Yount, the White administrator of the hospital. Yount demanded an apology from Katz for his false version of Drew’s death, and in May 1971 Katz acknowledged his “error” in a letter to Yount. The latest edition of Katz’s book has quietly dropped the story, but Katz has made no effort to undo the mischief already caused by the earlier editions.

Indeed, Katz, a Jew, earns his living peddling stories designed to make minorities look good and Whites feel guilty. He has been a major figure in the promotion of the “Black history” craze which has overtaken the U.S. educational system in the last 15 years, inventing Black gunfighters who won the West, a Black explorer who discovered the North Pole, Black military heroes responsible for America’s freedom, and Black scientists who launched the scientific revolution of the 20th century.

In addition to Eyewitness: the Negro in American History, Katz has also written Teachers’ Guide to American Negro History (1968), American Minorities and Majorities: a Syllabus of United States History for Secondary Schools (1970), The Black West: a Documentary and Pictorial History (1971), A History of Black Americans (1973), Minorities in American History (six volumes, 1974–75), and four other books dealing with the same general subject matter. He is also the editor of several series of monographs on Black history and is a member of the editorial board of the periodical Black Studies.

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Last week a member of the organization I head, the National Alliance, sent me something his nine-year-old daughter had brought home from school. He lives in Macon, Georgia, and his daughter is a fourth grader at a private school there. Last week her class went on a field trip to visit a Black museum in Macon and learn a bit about Black history. The museum is the federally funded Tubman African American Museum. It’s supported by our tax dollars.

It is named after Harriet Tubman, a Black slave who was employed by Abolitionist organizations in the North during the period just before the Civil War to induce other slaves in the South to leave their plantations and head north along the so-called “Underground Railroad.” Sometimes she used a revolver to coax those who weren’t sure they wanted to go. The White fourth graders visiting the museum got a little sermon about the wickedness of slavery and of White people for having imposed it on Blacks. They also had a lecture on the history and accomplishments of Negroes, and each was handed a sheet headed “African American Inventor’s” (sic) listing 120 or so things supposedly invented by Blacks.

Here are the first six items on the list of Black inventions: the pyramids, paper, chess, the alphabet, medicine, and civilization.

After this start the rest of the list is a bit anticlimactic, with such items as the doorknob, the mop, the curtain rod, peanut butter, and the helicopter.

With the exception of peanut butter, which is generally credited to Black agricultural technician George Washington Carver, this list is so fantastic that most of us get a good chuckle when we read it.

But the really tragic part of this story is that, although these wild pipe dreams about Blacks designing and architecting the pyramids, inventing the alphabet and the helicopter, and so on may be funny to us, they’re not funny to White fourth graders. When a museum guide, even a Black guide, or their teacher tells them that Blacks invented paper, the alphabet, and civilization, they take it all very seriously. They believe it. My member’s nine-year-old daughter believed it. She came home from school after the field trip and told her parents quite seriously that she had learned that Blacks had done just about everything worth doing in the development of our civilization, and she wondered why Whites hadn’t done anything.

Now, that was not why my member was paying to send his daughter to a private school, and he was pretty steamed about this effort to brainwash her against her own race. And I’m steamed too. We all ought to be mad as hell. We all ought to be in the mood for getting out our rifles and beginning a general cleanup in America. Which, of course, is why the Jews, feminists, and liberals promoting this sort of brainwashing are so hot to get our guns away from us.

Before I talk further about the brainwashing campaign directed at our children, I want to make a few distinctions among the people involved in the campaign.

First, it should be noted that the Blacks are as much victims of this campaign as Whites are — even though many Blacks are involved in it. The childishly naive list of supposed Black inventions distributed by the Tubman African American Museum in Macon, Georgia, for example, is obviously a Black creation. One can understand the fascination this sort of thing has for most Blacks. Since they never developed an alphabet or writing when they were in Africa (contrary to the claims of the Tubman Museum), they had no written history at all before being brought to the White world as slaves. And the history they have acquired since then is a rather inglorious one. Many Blacks feel this shortcoming. Despite all of the assurances of White liberals that they are “equal,” they don’t really believe it. Deep inside them there is a nagging certainty of their inferiority, and they have clutched at straws in an effort to quell that nagging. Their fictitious Black history, with all its imagined great Black intellectual accomplishments, is one of those straws. Such straws would not be necessary if they were living in a society of their own. It is only when they try to become the “equals” of Whites in a White society that they feel inferior.

Anyone who encourages them to clutch such straws only postpones their coming to grips with the fact that they need their own society as much as we need ours. Thus, these people do them a disservice. And of course, the White schoolteacher of my member’s nine-year-old daughter who did nothing to refute the Tubman Museum’s claims also is one who does such a disservice. I do not know this schoolteacher myself, but it’s a pretty good bet that, like most of her colleagues, she is simply going with the flow of Political Correctness. She understands that Blacks didn’t invent writing or the helicopter or even the doorknob, but she feels that it would not be polite to say so. It might even be considered — heaven forbid — racist, so she keeps her mouth shut and lets her students be brainwashed… more here: http://www.natall.com/free-speech/fs981a.html

At Resisting Defamation, we are exploring ways of dealing with persons of color and self-loathing white persons who seek to undermine the multicultural iron laws (which dictate that members of each demographic have the right to express themselves) by working to undermine white values and goals. We certainly may discuss ourselves in a completely white-centric way without reference to the views and values of other demographics.

It is a kind of defamation that says your heroes, your histories, your cultures, your values, and your views must accept Others’ ideologies as—-what?—-ideas that replace one’s own, the loss of one’s own histories, etc.? This is nothing more nor less than supremacy in action. The diverse white American peoples have the unlimited right to document, teach, and understand our own cultures and histories without contesting those of other demographics who may teach their own children whatever they wish.

That is, a different attack on the pernicious effects of constantly comparing and contrasting in a contest for supremacy for viewpoint would be to simply document our own cultures and histories, and teach them. That might be easier said than done, but agreeing with Others’ cultural viewpoints is simply not a requirement under the iron laws of multiculturalism. And, as American cultural unity has been broken by multiculturalism, we are entirely free to argue that multiculturalism grants us the freedom to represent ourselves.

Black History is no myth, and you should be ashamed of yourself for saying so. My heart sank when I realized how you’ve failed to see black history the value it gives to communities of color: shaking down Whitey for mo’ money!

Polignano’s Emory is in full attack mode, perhaps as an atonement for giving him a degree.

The Transforming Community Project seeks to mobilize individuals in every sector of Emory University in a reflective, fact-driven engagement with the University’s history and current experiences of race, gender, sexuality and other forms of human difference at Emory and beyond. These activities provide opportunities to develop new, concrete strategies to transform the University. All members of the Emory community (staff, faculty, students and alumni) are invited to participate in Community Dialogues; to develop research projects related to Emory’s history and current experiences around diversity; and to use these dialogue and research experiences to effect change in the community at large.

The name “Transforming Community Project” begins with a recognition that all communities are constantly changing. In the last fifty years, however, many universities have faced new challenges as they shifted from being institutions exclusively designed to reinforce students’ middle-class and elite mores, with populations that are homogenous in terms of race and gender. The greater racial, ethnic, gender, class and international diversity among students is mirrored by the faculty, although to a lesser extent; and by staff. The Transforming Community Project seeks to empower members of the Emory community—both individually and collectively–to actively address the challenges and opportunities provided by this increased diversity.

Emory University is well positioned to engage in this work. Founded in 1836, Emory was a jewel of the cotton and slave South, dedicated to upholding the slave system and to creating leaders for that system. Emory remained a segregated, predominantly white and male institution through much of the twentieth century. But today, the University boasts one of the most diverse campus populations in the United States.

The Transforming Community Project is supported by generous funding from Emory University’s Office of the President; Office of the Provost; Office of Community and Diversity; and the Creating Community, Engaging Society Theme of the university-wide strategic plan. In addition, the Project has been awarded two grants from the Ford Foundation’s Difficult Dialogues Initiative.

Never hurts to have a good reminder of their methods. We most worry for the Whites who fall for this by saying, “Oh, yes, please, suffering Africans, teach me your pain so I can atone for my own racism by letting you steal my dignity, job, career, and blonde daughters. I will never feel that we have done enough to overcome our shameful past until I have mud-brown mulatto grandbabies bouncing on my knee at Christmas.”

There is a developmental continuum through which groups engaged in the transformation process of becoming anti-racist multicultural organizations move.

That continuum begins with the de facto segregated institution (Stage 1). Moving to the next stage requires learning to appreciate diversity and beginning to raise awareness of oppression issues. Here the group begins to examine the nature of stereotyping and prejudice, and examines the consequences of behaviors stemming from prejudice.
At Stage 2, groups move into a passive, club-type institution, which may have a few token people of color. Moving to the next stage requires that groups understand the nature of oppression and begin to understand the need to take action against oppressive attitudes and behaviors.

From that step, a group begins to manifest a symbolic change with a commitment to being open (Stage 3). In this situation there is a desire for inclusion, even recruitment of people of color, but it remains symbolic with no contextual changes in culture, policies and decision making, and little awareness, if any, of the habit of privilege. Groups do begin to take action to stop oppressive actions.

Stage 4, the next level to which groups move, is an awakening, generally with the help of consultants and training, which stimulates a deeper analysis and an expanding view of all those whom diversity might include. Although there is a desire on this level to eliminate discriminatory practices, it is implemented within the context of the norms and practices of the dominant group’s world view.

Moving to Stage 5 involves a group in making structural change and redefining itself, becoming willing to share power, problem solving, and decisions, to struggle together to find the win/win solution, opening up all aspects of the group’s life to examination.
When this process is completed, a group is ready to become truly inclusive (Stage 6), understanding diversity as an asset and reflection of the group’s culture. Use of power and decision making reflect the contributions of diverse peoples and their world views. The sense of community and mutual caring feels authentic and shapes the life of the group. Such a group has become anti-racist and multicultural.